MacDonald, ZiggyThe Under-Reporting of Property Crime: A Microeconometric Analysis.In this paper we use data from the 1994 and 1996 British Crime
Surveys (BCS) to examine the influence of socio-economic factors on
the reporting of crime. Through probit estimation, we find that the
probability of a burglary being reported is significantly reduced if the
individual is currently unemployed or has been engaged in illicit activity
over the past year. We also find that, as anticipated, the reporting
likelihood is much increased if the incident involves a positively valued
loss. Using decomposition techniques, we also show that this result is
not driven by differences in mean sample characteristics. Our results
suggest that the difference between the recorded crime rate and the
true crime rate is not constant through the economic cycle. This may
have implications for models of crime and economic activity that make
use of recorded crime figures.reported crime;microeconometric model;decomposition2009-03-16